By Jake Sheridan
Have you ever looked at a graph or chart in Google Sheets and struggled to understand what the displayed data represents? Adding a legend and labels to your graph can help clear up any confusion. Fortunately, Google Sheets makes this process easy.
Inserting a Graph
If you don’t already have a graph in your spreadsheet, you’ll need to insert one in order to add a legend. Follow these steps to insert a graph in Google Sheets:
Step 1
Select the range of data you want to graphically represent, making sure to include the headers as they will be used as chart labels.
Step 2
Open the “Insert” menu and select “Chart”.
Step 3
A new graph will be inserted as a floating element above the cells. You can click and drag to position the graph or resize it using the resizing handles in the corners.
Step 4
The Chart Editor sidebar will also open when you insert the new graph. This is where you can make changes to the appearance of your graph by modifying the chart type, colors, axes, and more. Make the necessary adjustments to the graph, then close the Chart Editor sidebar.
Adding a Legend
Once you have a graph, it’s time to add a legend.
Step 1
Open the Chart Editor for the graph by selecting the graph and clicking on the three-dot menu icon in the corner of the graph. In the menu that appears, select “Edit chart”. The Chart Editor for that graph will open.
Step 2
At the top of the Chart Editor, click on the “Customize” tab, then click on the legend section to expand the legend options.
Step 3
Click on the “Position” dropdown menu and choose where you want to display the legend relative to the graph.
Step 4
The legend will appear in the selected location.
Updating Legend Labels
Now that we have a graph with a legend, we can update the legend labels.
Unfortunately, Google Sheets does not provide an option to do this directly in the Chart Editor settings. However, it is still easy to do by updating the column headers. Just follow these steps:
Step 1
Double-click on the column header of the data you want to update the legend label for to enter editing mode. Type the text you want to appear in the label, then press Enter.
Step 2
Repeat Step 1 for any other columns you want to update the legend label for.
Step 3
Once you have finished updating the column headers, the legend labels in the graph will be updated.
Summary
In this tutorial, I have explained how to label a legend in Google Sheets. Want to learn more? Check out all the Google Sheets tutorials on Crawlan.com.
